Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

1

     He felt like he had been two minutes too late all his life. He used to say to the moment, ‘Stay now! You are so beautiful,’ but it never did. All that remained of her, was a roundish grey cloud on the white wall, in the kitchen, where her buttocks had rested, rested and swayed as she listened to his whispers. And two small, black half-moon marks, above the skirting-board where her shoe heels had lodged as she stood on tip-toe to reach him. Compared to the yawning hours and days between their meetings, it was a two minute affair. Soon after, there must have been psychic epidemics and miracles of short-sighted women. It was all flux - nothing stood still. Then it became difficult suddenly, to lay aside cherished loves. It was difficult but somehow he managed it. He recalled, in his enforced melancholy, bands of lace, bows of ribbon, caresses of corkscrew curls, a lost pearl from a necklace, a particular perfume, a raised skirt in the firelight, a certain small bruise on a soft thigh, soothed with a wetted finger - and it was torment. What else was there to say? He thought of them often? He is thinking of them? Are they walking in their streets in the winter, the collars of their coats turned up? Are they smiling but remote? Or, is he not giving anyone a second thought? Has he shut down, turned off and gone into retirement?

     When love is no secret, pleasure always finds an open window. To those distant and beloved he says, that he thinks the gods will forgive him everything, it’s their trade.

2

     His ways used to be through the soil turning between the winter and spring. He could explain the gardens with his tongue, knotting, like the string in the bottom of his pockets but preferred the safety of a grin. He was concerned with life’s sometimes dark, inexplicable hollowness. Those tangled mornings among geraniums, with black shreds of peat packed behind the fingernails of tired hands, hands so often imploring or empty, what of them? What ruins of abandoned occupations contrived to lay him there, so low, squatting in the flower beds, for art? For the frantic postures of love’s El Dorado? Were the only insignia left to him for several thousand days and nights’ distress, the ploughed furrows and ravines of disbelief across his brow?

     Yes, nothing more than these but nothing less.

     Her way was within the certainty of her youth, visiting each day like clockwork, presenting a daily tableaux of her ampleness as she descended the same hillock. She wore a panache of humming bird, a squirrel trimmed, quilted dolman, musketeer gauntlets and cockspur-red jackboots. She carried varnished cork beer mats portraying the sights of Paris, a necklace made from the spines of her cads, a goldfish in a plastic bag, half full of water and she wore silence like a poultice, come to heal the wounds of noise. He could see himself offering her posies by the fountain on bended knee, singing to her those amorous songs, wishing to enfold her hips, hoping through this, that she might recognise him. No brightness grew into him as she continuously left, knowing nothing of his passion, absorbed more by the antics of her dog, a yipping little thing, he secretly called, ‘shitter’.

     Darkly, he would exclaim to the soil, hands wringing words from a dry throat.

     It may have been life but it was slow.